Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,26

the Americas, back down along the eastern coasts of Russia and Japan and on into the South Pacific. It was volcano country.

It seemed odd, I said, given all this seismic activity, that superrich Silicon Valley technologists were supposedly apocalypse-proofing themselves by buying up land down here.

“Yeah,” said Anthony, “but some of them are buying farms and sheep stations pretty far inland. Tsunamis aren’t going to be a big issue there. And what they’re after is space, and clean water. Two things we’ve got a lot of down here.”

It was precisely this phenomenon—of tech billionaires buying up property in New Zealand in anticipation of civilizational collapse—that constituted our shared apocalyptic obsession. This was the reason I had come down here, to find out about these apocalyptic retreats, and to see what New Zealanders thought of this perception of their country.

In any discussion of our anxious historical moment, its apprehensions of decay and collapse, New Zealand was never very far from being invoked. It was the ark of nation-states, an island haven amid a rising tide of apocalyptic unease: a wealthy, politically stable country unlikely to be seriously affected by climate change, a place of lavish natural beauty with vast stretches of unpopulated land, clean air, fresh water. For those who could afford it, New Zealand offered at the level of an entire country the sort of reassurance promised by Vicino’s bunkers.

According to New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs, in the two days following the 2016 election, the number of Americans who visited its website to inquire about the process of gaining citizenship increased by a factor of fourteen compared with the same day in the previous month. That same week, The New Yorker ran a piece about the superrich making preparations for a grand civilizational crack-up. Speaking of New Zealand as a “favored refuge in the event of a cataclysm,” Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, claimed that “saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more.”

And then there was Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who had cofounded PayPal and had been one of Facebook’s earliest investors. It had recently emerged that Thiel had bought a sprawling property in New Zealand, on the shores of Lake Wanaka, the apparent intention of which was to provide him with a place to retreat to should America become unlivable due to economic chaos, civil unrest, or some or other apocalyptic event. (Sam Altman, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential entrepreneurs, alluded in an interview to an arrangement with his friend Thiel, whereby in the eventuality of some kind of systemic collapse scenario—synthetic virus breakout, rampaging AI, resource war between nuclear-armed states, and so forth—they both get on a private jet and fly to this property in New Zealand. The plan from this point, you’d have to assume, was to sit out the collapse of civilization before re-emerging to provide seed funding for, say, the insect-based protein sludge market.)

In the immediate wake of Altman’s revelation about the New Zealand apocalypse contingency plan, a reporter for the New Zealand Herald named Matt Nippert had begun looking into the question of how exactly Thiel had come into possession of this 477-acre former sheep station in the South Island, the larger and more sparsely populated of the country’s two major landmasses. Foreigners looking to purchase significant amounts of land in New Zealand typically had to pass through a stringent government vetting process, but in Thiel’s case, Nippert learned, no such process had been necessary. The reason for this, he revealed, was that Thiel was in fact a citizen of New Zealand, despite having spent no more than twelve days in the country up to that point and having not been seen in the place since 2011. He hadn’t even needed to make the trip to New Zealand to have his citizenship confirmed, it turned out: the deal had been sealed in a private ceremony at a consulate handily located, for Thiel’s purposes, in Santa Monica.

Everyone was always saying these days that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Everyone was always saying it, in my view, because it was obviously true. The perception, paranoid or otherwise, that billionaires were preparing for a coming collapse seemed a literal manifestation of this axiom. Those who were saved, in the end, would be those who could afford the premium of salvation. And New Zealand, in this story, had become a kind